“Are there other sources of funding we could find? Perhaps. But nothing is likely to match the scale of the federal government and (The United States Department of Agriculture) are able to provide to be able to do a project of this magnitude,” says Rufus Isaacs, the project’s director.

Isaacs says it will be very difficult to restart the research once the shutdown ends. That's because many researchers are already looking for new jobs and because MSU's research partners are looking at shifting resources to other projects with more stable funding.